Why it looks like that
Siena was Florence's equal — a banking and wool city with its own currency and its own ambitions — and in the middle of the fourteenth century it was building a cathedral intended to be the largest in Christendom. Then the Black Death arrived in 1348 and killed a large part of the population, the money stopped, and the extension was abandoned.
You can still walk into the unfinished nave: an enormous roofless arcade beside the cathedral, open to the sky, which was meant to be the transept of a far bigger church. It is the clearest picture anywhere of a city's ambition being cut off mid-sentence.
Because the money never came back, Siena was never comprehensively rebuilt. That is the whole reason it looks the way it does.
The Campo and the cathedral
The Piazza del Campo is a sloping brick shell, divided into nine segments for the medieval Council of Nine, with the Palazzo Pubblico and the Torre del Mangia at the bottom. People sit on the brick. It is free, and it is one of the great public spaces in Europe.
Inside the Palazzo Pubblico is Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good and Bad Government — a fourteenth-century painting of what a well-run city looks like and what a badly-run one looks like, made for the room where the government actually sat.
The cathedral is a striped black-and-white cliff of a building. Its floor is a series of inlaid marble panels, and ⚠️ they are covered for most of the year and uncovered for a limited period — check before going if the floor is why you are going.
The Palio, and getting there
The Palio is a bareback horse race round the Campo, run twice each summer between the city's contrade. It is not a show for visitors; it is the organising principle of local life. On those days the city is packed and normal visiting is impossible.
⚠️ Trains from Florence take about an hour and a half and arrive at a station that is outside and below the walls. There is a chain of escalators up into the town, and local buses. It is not a walk you want to do with luggage or in August heat.
Buses from Florence go closer to the centre and some travellers prefer them for that reason.
⭐ Stay until the evening if you can. The day-trip coaches leave in the late afternoon and the city becomes a different, quieter place about an hour later.
Siena in pictures
